Darwin's First Law
by pollywantsa
Summary: Arcadia has a new captain, but the change of management isn't sitting well with Aristotle Jones. CGI movie-verse, and a sequel (sort of) to The Aristotle Transposition. Rated M for language and violent themes.
1. Part 1

**Darwin's First Law**

* * *

 **PART ONE**

* * *

 _Set one month post the end of the 2013 movie, and post the Battle of Earth._

* * *

He was supposed to be my captain.

Strike that. He _is_ my captain. But for some reason that notion was having trouble percolating through my skull. Instead the idea just kind of buzzed annoyingly at the periphery of what I used to call my zone of rational reasoning – because my reasoning had taken a beating in recent weeks, and my rationality had apparently busted out of my head one night when I wasn't paying attention.

I should have got out of bed and followed it.

Or at least made a pretence of looking for it. Because here I was, today, stomping along the streets of Kingdom, with that annoying notion of _captain_ buzzing incessantly against the zone of my blasted reasoning.

'Hey,' Yama said, from somewhere behind me.

I swiped a hand at the buzz in my ear, lengthened my stride and increased the distance between us.

'Ari,' he called out, injecting an element of command into his voice. If you could call it that. Because I wouldn't call it that. But since he _was_ my commanding officer, and since I didn't think he'd last an hour on his own if I disappeared down the nearest alley, and since I didn't want to have to answer to Harlock if I returned minus _Arcadia's_ new captain, I shortened my steps and allowed him to catch up.

'Ari,' he said again, his footsteps crunching in the gravel as he closed the distance between us. 'It might be easier if – '

I turned a scowl upon him, the look on my face shutting him precipitously up. In his scuffed and battered jacket I was struck for the umpteenth time by how much he looked like Harlock. Especially since the addition of the scar and the eye-patch. I realised, as I stared, that it was mostly his face I couldn't stand.

'Listen,' I said, 'they've got doctors here. Good ones. And we've got cash. Why don't we see about fixing that eye?'

Surprise registered on his face, whether from the sudden change of topic or the suggestion of fixing his eye I didn't know.

'What say, kid?' I said, trying to inject an edge of concern into my voice. Like I cared about anything other than my own imperative to make him look less like Harlock. 'How about it?'

A group of passer's-by jostled around us and I grabbed him by the arm and shoved him out of the flow of traffic.

'I don't think it can be fixed,' he said, shrugging my hand away. 'The dark matter had no effect, so I doubt – '

'Dark matter don't fix everything,' I said. 'And if a doc down here can't fix it, there's always a transplant. We can get you a whole new eyeball.'

He stared at me, unsure if I was pulling his leg or genuinely concerned. For the record I was genuinely concerned – for my own mental health. And if I had to grow him an eyeball in a tank in the bathroom myself, then goddamn it, I would.

'Aristotle,' he said.

'Hey!' I aimed an angry finger at him. 'Only my mother calls me Aristotle. And the capt…Harlock.' _Shit._ I was never going to get used to that. 'And Kei. Sometimes. When I let her. But I won't be letting you, so don't even try.'

'What the fuck is up your arse,' he suddenly challenged. 'Ever since I came aboard – '

'Exactly,' I said, taking a step closer to him with the finger still stretched out like a knife between us. 'Exactly that. You came the fuck aboard. And then you – '

Something hit me from behind, slammed me square between the shoulder-blades and stopped me mid-stride, mid-flight, mid-what-the-fuck-ever, with my finger still raised in the air and my mouth half-open with the diatribe I was preparing to unleash caught hard in my throat. I felt my heart stop, my breath catching in my lungs as every nerve in my body screamed blue bloody murder all at the same time.

'Disruptor,' I ground out as the pain was followed by a novocaine wave of numbness that buckled me at the knees.

'Get help,' I gasped as I fell into him, his hands fumbling uselessly at my sweater as I slid like lead-weight down the front of his jacket, the zipper catching at my cheek as the world tilted crazily on its axis. I caught a glimpse of Yama's crotch as I slid on by, the side of a building, a woman standing in a doorway with one hand on her mouth, and then the street was up close and in my face, a splash of drool escaping from my open mouth and spattering into the gravel.

'Ari! _Move,_ dammit!' Yama's fingers were still caught in my sweater, his hands heaving uselessly as he tried to drag me back up from the street. His voice sounded from somewhere above my head, but all I could see was the road and the ever-widening puddle of drool. _Granite,_ was the irrelevant thought that flashed through my mind, my eyeballs focussed uselessly on the crushed shards of gravel that lay scattered on the road. Crystals of quartz sparked bright in the sun, were obliterated by a shadow passing before my eyes, the glinting stones shattered by a pair of green-grey boots that stepped slowly into my field of view.

The owner of the boots had a voice that sounded as gravelly as the road. 'Step away, boy.'

Yama's fingers slipped out of the weave of my sweater and there was a moment of panic as I lost the lifeline of his hands.

'Who the hell are you,' Yama said from somewhere high above my head, 'and what the hell have you – '

'I said,' Gravel-voice repeated coolly, a green-grey boot poking into my face the way a man pokes at a snake to make sure it's dead. 'Step. Away.'

If the kid knew what was good for him he'd do what he was told. Instead, he said, 'I don't think I'm the one that needs to step away.'

There was an explosion of raucous laughter and I didn't need to see to know that Yama was outnumbered. From somewhere far away a jackboot slammed into my ribs and made the air whuff painlessly out of my lungs. The disruptor's effects had reached their maximum efficacy – I was nothing more than a bag of nerveless flesh and bone, my world reduced to the view through my frozen-open eyes. Another kick landed in my ribs, a sensation of movement rather than pain, and I heard a bone crack somewhere behind the thud of leather meeting meat.

'Hey!' Yama's boots scuffed through the gravel somewhere beside me, and I heard the distinct sound of his dragoon being unholstered. 'Like I said – ,' there was a faint click as the safety was disengaged, ' – I'm not the one that needs to step away.'

Gravel-voice laughed, and there was the whine of a repeater rifle powering up. 'Be a shame to mess your face up worse than it is, boy, so how's about you hustle that tight little ass back to whatever whorehouse this piece of shit picked you up in.'

'You mean the same whorehouse where your daddy met your mommy?' Yama sneered.

'Ho ho,' Gravel-voice laughed. 'Looks like I need to teach you a lesson. But first – '

The green-grey boots shifted in the gravel. Another laugh sounded from somewhere high above, and then a green-grey boot slammed into the side of my head and sent me down into darkness.

* * *

Awareness returned slowly. Mostly it consisted of pain. Electric sparks of sensation as my nerves started refiring, my muscles twitching randomly like a fish slowly dying on a cold metal floor.

I cracked open an eyelid and immediately slammed it shut again. The light was way too bright, the glare setting up an unyielding throbbing in the compartments of my head that flashed me back to a green-grey boot slamming into my face. I sent my tongue to my teeth to make sure they were all still in my mouth – they were, but there was blood coming from somewhere, and a split in my lip that stung with the unmistakeable tang of fresh meat.

I opened an eye again, found my face up close and personal with a vista of grey pressed metal. I was heaped face-down like a bag of wet sand, crumpled awkwardly on my stomach with my arms pinned beneath me and the deck sticky and wet beneath my cheek. I moved my head experimentally, felt the brittle tug of blood where it crusted beneath my face. I groaned, despite myself, and slowly peeled my cheek away from the deck.

The fish analogy suddenly became more relevant as I attempted to struggle spastically from the floor, collapsing back into a heap as I discovered my wrists and ankles were cuffed. Whoever had dumped me here wanted me incapacitated – I would be lucky if I could even manage to sit upright in this condition.

 _So this is how it ends,_ I thought stupidly to myself. _Face-down in a puddle of blood…_

Blood. My nose was full of it, and the cold-metal taste of it was thick on my tongue. I coughed, choked on it, gritted my teeth and tried for the second time to heave my way from off the floor. It was the longest struggle of my life, but I managed at last to prop myself against the wall and allowed myself the luxury of another groan, comforted by the sound of my own voice as the air came sighing from my lungs. I would live, or so I thought, as I stared down at the blood that was soaked into the front of my sweater.

At least they'd left me my sweater, even if they'd ripped it out of my pants and left it bunched up around my back. I'd been frisked thoroughly while I was out – the bastards had taken my belts, my gun, my knives, my comms, my gloves, my boots, and even my goddamned socks. All I had left was my sweater and my pants, and the shiny wrist and ankle jewellery that was keeping me hobbled on my ass.

A draft played against the small of my back as I stared down at my father's toes. They weren't bad toes, as far as toes go, but I couldn't feel them properly and they were waxy and white from the cold. I brought my knees up closer to my body, lifted my cuffed hands to poke gingerly at my nose and mouth. Pain chewed away at me from unexpected places, one eye swollen and watering, the crack in my ribs burning with each breath, and my arse going numb from the cold metal of the floor. I was on a ship, a small one judging from the engine that hummed at the periphery of my hearing, and it felt as though there were only a couple of feet of hull between my back and the icy wastes of space. The only contents of the cold bright cell were me and a strip-light and a surveillance cam. And a puddle of congealing blood in the place where I'd so recently been laying.

I scowled up at the surveillance cam, hoping the death stare would be enough to draw the rats out of their hole. Apparently it was, because maybe ten minutes passed – or maybe it was an hour, because who the fuck could tell when time was measured by the tick of your heart – before the door slid itself open with a pneumatic hiss and permitted the entry of a very large rat. Just the one. The one with the green-grey boots that had so recently become acquainted with my face.

'You're a popular man, Aristotle Jones.'

The voice was as gravelly as I remembered from the street, a phlegmy rasp that grated along my spine like fingernails over glass. I suppressed a shudder as goose-bumps traced their way across my flesh and kept my gaze fixed sullenly on the boots. On what looked like blood staining a green-grey toe.

The boots came closer, skirting the smear of blood that was drying darkly on the floor and stopping just inches away from my thigh. One of the boots poked at me with a toe. 'I'm going to make a lot of money out of you, Aristotle Jones. The Sanction has put quite a price on your head.'

'Your information's out of date,' I said, still staring at the boots. 'And besides, the Sanction's days are numbered.'

'Just as well,' he said, squatting down to my level. 'I never liked dealing with government organisations. Too much red tape.' He reached out a finger to scratch at the blood on my face. 'And they don't like to see their merchandise damaged.'

I didn't move. Let the finger pick at my whiskers. 'You got blood on my sweater,' I said, still not looking at him.

'Hmm,' he exhaled. 'Got it on my boots, too.'

My mouth twitched, my skin crawling beneath the squirreling of his fingernail.

'Tell me,' he said as he scratched at a muttonchop, 'what do you call these things?' The finger fell away. 'And do you remember a man by the name of Hechi?'

I turned to look at him then, leaned my head against the wall and took my measure. He smiled, gave me a glimpse of his surprisingly white teeth.

He had probably been good looking once, before acid had taken half his face, the scars twisting their way down his throat and disappearing like ropes beneath the collar of his fatigues. His eyes glinted bright in the overhead light, all the colour leached out of them so that they stared at me whitely, as though there was nothing at all living in the space behind them. I'd seen those eyes a thousand times in the mines, the end-product of generations spent living in the dark. But where the eyes in the mines had been red-rimmed and watery and filled with a hopeless despair, these eyes were dry and hard and cold, the left eye puckered at its periphery where the scar tissue twisted it into tiny, fleshy knots. He lifted a finger to the twisted eye, as though it still caused him pain. Or maybe it was my stare that was causing him pain. He was still smiling, a half-smile stifled by his scar-frozen face.

'Because Hechi,' he continued, scratching absently at his twisted eye, 'remembers you.'

I stared at him, at the smirking mouth, at the throat scarred so bad it had burnt the edges of his voice. 'Looks like you and Hechi are old friends,' I said. 'Or did you get those burns in a teahouse?'

The white eyes flashed, and I watched from the corner of my eye as his fingers curled into a fist.

'From one escapee to another,' I said, my attention tight on the clenching fist, 'Hechi never forgets the ones that get away.'

He uncurled the fist and stared down at his scarred fingers as if to remind himself of what he'd got away from.

His lip twitched, and he turned to me with a sneer. 'I suppose there's always the famous Captain Harlock,' he said. 'I'm sure he'll match whatever Hechi is offering.'

That made me laugh, a high-pitched giggle that tugged at the split in my lip. Because which Captain Harlock? The one who was locked in his room, or the one who'd left me lying in the dirt?

I coughed, the laughter choking in my throat. 'What happened,' I asked, wincing at the pain in my ribs, 'to the kid?'

'Him?' Gravel-voice snorted his surprise, an impatient disdainful sound. 'Hit him in his shooting arm and he took off.' He shrugged at me. 'You get what you pay for.'

'Thanks.' I coughed, harder, and spat up blood, aimed it for his boot and missed. 'I'll remember for next time.'

'If your captain doesn't pay up, there won't be any next time.'

I giggled again, sounding hysterical even to myself. 'You are one stupid motherfucker.' I looked into the acid-scarred face, allowed myself the pleasure of a smile of smug satisfaction. 'I'll let you in on a secret, sport, since we're getting off to such a friendly start. That kid you scared away _is_ my captain.'

Doubt chased across his face, and I let my grin grow wider as the doubt was followed by disbelief, and then a red-hot anger that inflamed the scars on his face. He stared at me, lips working as though he was trying to swallow something that tasted really, really bad.

'Yeah, that's right,' I said. 'The biggest bounty in the galaxy and you scared him away. Tell me,' I leaned towards the twisted, tortured face, 'you really think he's gonna come back? For _me?'_

Gravel-voice stared at me, his lips pale with anger and the white eyes burning hot with rage. I leaned my head back against the wall, alternately giggling and choking and spitting up blood – until his hand slammed into the side of my head and wiped the smile from my face. I snarled at him, showed him my bloodied teeth.

'Hechi it is, then.' He stared down at the blood on his fingers.

'Whatever.' I spat out another dark-stained gobbet. 'I'm screwed.'

'You sure are.' He smiled, his eyes studying the swollen contours of my face. 'My team are out there rolling dice. Winner gets you. _First.'_ He wiped his hand down his thigh and curled the fingers into a fist. 'No reason we can't take advantage of the merchandise while we have it in our possession.'

I stared into the cold, white eyes. 'Do you have a name,' I asked, 'or should I just call you 'Sick Fuck'?'

His fist darted out and made contact with my mouth, reopened the split in my lip and sent a cascade of blood down my chin.

'Oh look,' he said as I recoiled from the blow. 'I got more blood on your sweater.'

'Nnh,' I said, blinking stupidly as stars danced before my eyes.

His hand lashed out towards me, fingers snaking into my hair as he heaved me away from the wall and slammed me face-down onto the deck. I sprawled grunting onto the metal, my nose smashing into the floor as leapt onto my back and pressed his full weight down on top of me. His chin dug into my neck, his breath hot as a hand snaked between my stomach and the deck and fumbled for the zipper of my pants.

'What's my name?' he breathed, his lips wet against my ear.

'Sick Fuck,' I panted, bucking beneath his weight as I tried to dislodge him.

'Don't wear yourself out,' he laughed, one hand on the back of my head as he ground my bloodied face into the deck, the other hand still fumbling at the catch on my pants. 'Gotta lot of men counting on riding you tonight.'

I twisted beneath him, spat blood and managed to get my cuffed hands beneath my chest and heave myself up from the deck. The movement dislodged him enough for me to get to my knees, but the bastard was instantly back on me again, clinging to me like a leech latched onto blood. I managed to twist around, ribs screaming as I impacted an elbow into the burns on his face and felt him slip grunting from my back.

I heaved myself to my shackled feet, stood swaying unsteadily as he climbed grinning to his feet and wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand.

'You want it rough?' he asked, closing the distance between us.

I braced myself. I had nowhere to go, and I wasn't going to stay on my feet long with both my ankles bound and he knew it. I brought my cuffed hands up defensively, tensed myself as he laughed and then launched himself at me. The impact knocked me straight off my feet, slammed me hard against the wall with the breath whoofing out of my lungs as I collapsed again beneath him. He had a hand around my throat before I had a chance to recover, fingers closing off my windpipe with all the weight of him behind them.

'I'll give it to you rough,' he said, his other hand sliding into view and glinting with a sudden flash of steel. He pinned me beneath his body, and I felt a knife slide into the hollow above my hip with the insidious sting of metal parting flesh. He grinned and twisted the knife slowly, loosed his fingers around my throat just enough for me suck in a lungful of air.

'Son-of-a- _bitch,'_ I choked out with the knife turning in my side and Sick Fuck's goddamned erection pushing hard against my thigh. I struggled futilely beneath him, my arms crushed uselessly between us as he smiled into my eyes.

'First I'm gonna bleed you,' he said, his breath hot and sour in my face. 'And then I'm gonna ream y – '

The room canted sideways, his fingers slipping from my throat as a great grinding sounded through the hull. I didn't feel the knife slide out of me, felt only the blood running hot down my side as the ship shuddered around us with the high-pitched screech of metal on metal. From somewhere far away I heard the familiar thud of boarding tubes impacting with the hull, felt the slow drop of pressure as the ship began to split apart at the seams. I smiled. The calm, beatific smile of a man for whom the universe is suddenly good again.

'What the hell,' Sick Fuck grunted, a panicked, animal sound as he lurched to his feet and stared at the walls, as if they could possibly tell him what was going on. The knife dripped blood in his hand as he turned to glare down at me, the pale eyes narrowing with rage.

' _You,'_ he spat, lurching towards me with the knife raised dripping in the air. 'What the _fuck_ have you – '

The rest of the sentence never made it out of his mouth, the door of the cell exploding from its housing and slamming hard into his back. I threw myself sideways, narrowly avoided the falling of the door and the man as they clattered in a noisy heap to the floor.

'Uhh,' Sick Fuck said as the cell filled up with the tarnished golden armour of my comrades-at-arms – and truth be told, those sons-of-bitches had never looked more beautiful in my life.

'I hope you like it rough,' I gloated into Sick Fuck's stupid, grasping face. 'Because it looks like I won't be the one getting reamed tonight.'


	2. Part 2

**Darwin's First Law**

* * *

 **PART TWO**

* * *

Bob and Baptiste half-carried, half-dragged me to _Arcadia's_ medbay, pretending they couldn't hear my grunts and groans and apparently completely oblivious to my yelps of pain as they deposited me none-too-carefully on a pallet. Or maybe they weren't so oblivious, because the moment I'd laid myself wincing on the bed Baptiste cupped a gentle hand to my cheek and stared solicitously into my eyes.

'There, there,' he said.

'Piss off.' I jerked my face out of his hand and immediately regretted it, the movement making my head spin and causing the muscles of my neck to spasm in protest. I gasped, and maybe I went a bit green around the gills, because Baptiste took a none-too-subtle step back from the bed.

'Anything for you, Presh,' he grinned around his crazy accent, 'but we've got orders to get your sweater off. I was trying to ease you into it gently.'

'Give me strength,' I groaned, struggling upright and commencing the wincing thing again as Baptiste and Bob peeled the sweater from my back. They were trying to be gentle – as gentle as a pair of ham-fisted pirates can be – but it hurt like all fuck as the weave crusted away from the knife wound and sent a thin stream of blood cascading down the side of my pants.

'Them too,' Bob said, pointing at my trousers.

'How soon you want to die?' I snarked as I lay myself carefully back against the pallet.

Baptiste turned to Yama leaning against the bench at the far side of the bay. 'You heard him, Captain.'

 _Shit._ I hadn't seen Yama come in, had no idea he'd been standing there watching us the entire time. A little trick he'd learned from Harlock, no doubt…or maybe not. Yama's previous employment had involved an unnatural amount of skulking.

'Alright,' Yama said, pushing himself away from the bench. 'Back to your posts.'

'Aye, Captain,' Baptiste said, Bob echoing his words dumbly. I grimaced to myself and shifted uncomfortably on the bed.

'I'll let you keep your pants,' Yama said, grabbing hold of a suture tray and heading across the bay in my direction. 'And maybe your dignity.'

'Too late,' I said. 'I lost that when you left me in the dirt back on Kingdom.'

'Excuse me?' He dumped the tray onto the table beside the bed. 'Did you see how many of them there were?'

I glared up at the ceiling and chomped down on the inside of my lip.

'No, you didn't,' he answered for me. 'Because, like you said, you had your face in the dirt.' He dampened a piece of gauze and dabbed at the blood that had crusted around the knife wound. 'As it was I got shot. Totally ruined my jacket.'

'It was a crap jacket,' I said, hissing as the gauze hit a tender spot. 'About time someone put it out of its misery.'

'It was Harlock's jacket,' he said.

'Like I said. About time.' I slid my eyes sideways to look at him, trying to figure out where he got shot. He followed my gaze, raising his arm to display a bandage poking out from beneath a rolled-up sleeve.

'Hmh,' I grunted, staring. Harlock had a scar on his forearm, in just the same place. I felt a prickling along my spine, the kind of shiver you get when you are faced with the inexplicable. Or maybe it was just dark matter, sparking along my skin. That had been happening a lot, lately.

I transferred my gaze to Yama's face, watching him closely as he dumped a wad of bloodied gauze onto the table-top. He'd taken the patch off his damaged eye, which he sometimes did when the scars got to itching beneath the leather. His eyelid twitched as I watched, and he lifted the back of a hand to rub at it absently.

He sat back and appraised the gash in my side. 'It's a mess.'

'I've had worse.'

'So I see.' His gaze moved pointedly to the scar that scored its way down the other side of my abdomen. 'Looks like that one should have killed you.'

'Should've,' I said. 'Would've. If Harlock hadn't come along when he – ' I broke off, because I was giving too much away, and I wasn't ready for Yama to know me. Not all of me. Not yet.

He reached for the suture tray and busied himself preparing a needle and thread.

'Hey,' I said, stiffening on the pallet. 'You're not going to sew that up, are you?'

'Why not?' He turned to me with the needle. 'I've had training.'

'Where,' I inquired sarcastically. 'Field Dressings 101?'

'Something like that.' He stared at me patiently, waiting.

I sucked in a lungful of air, wincing as the movement of lungs against ribs caused the air to rush hissing back out again. 'Alright.' I turned my face to the ceiling, studied the conduits and port-lines as he busied himself with his needle.

'This won't be pleasant,' he said as his fingers pushed against the wound and pressed the edges together.

'Just get it over with,' I gruffed.

'You can't stand it, can you?'

I grunted as the first sting of the needle pricked into me. 'What?'

'When the men call me Captain.'

I grunted again, flinching involuntarily as he drew the thread through the skin.

'To be honest,' he said, 'I'm not sure I like it either.' The needle dug slowly at the wound. 'It's all a bit too – '

'Soon?' I said to the ceiling.

He didn't answer.

'Or maybe,' I continued, 'it was just so damned unexpected, considering what you did.' I turned to find him looking at me, his lips tight with something I didn't recognise. Maybe it was resignation. Maybe it was surprise that it had taken this long. But there was also acceptance there. He'd earned his lumps and he was prepared to take them, which none of us could say for Harlock.

'You sold us out,' I said to his unblinking face. 'Because of you we had our heads laid on the execution block. Do you know what it's like to be locked in a cell, waiting for death? Counting down the hours, the minutes, the seconds… Turning on each other in our final moments because we had to have somebody to blame?'

'I know who you blame,' he said quietly. 'And I came back to help you, knowing I was to blame.'

'Yeah, you saved us,' I conceded. I almost spat it at him. 'But then we _all… still… died.'_

He stared down at the wound, the needle gone still in his hand. 'And yet here you are, Aristotle, as full of blood and shit as the rest of us.'

'No thanks to you.' I turned away from the quiet face, dismissed him with the back of my head. ' _Arcadia_ resurrected who she wanted to resurrect.' I glanced around at the walls, stared into the winking eye of a monitor. 'Some of us came back that day. And some of us stayed dead.'

The needle pricked into me, made me suck in a hard breath.

'Good or bad,' I continued, 'those men were my brothers. And they're gone because you sold us out. Because you couldn't make up your damned mind which side of the fence you wanted to be on.'

The needle sank back into me, a faint hiss audible as the thread was drawn stinging through flesh. It proceeded that way for a while, the hiss and sting of Yama slowly stitching up a bag of blood and shit. A silence fell that was so oppressive I was compelled to break it with my tongue.

'Why did you come back for me?'

He didn't answer. Busied himself tying off knots, the sutures tugging tight at my skin. I watched him from the corner of my eye, head bent in concentration.

'Fair enough,' I said, filling the empty space with meaningless noise.

'You mean,' he asked, pulling extra hard at a stitch and making my eyes water with the pain, 'why'd I come back for a disagreeable son-of-a-bitch whose greatest dream in life is to shove me out the nearest airlock?'

I shifted on the bed, tried to pull away from the stinging tug on the sutures. 'Well, yeah.'

'I came back,' he said, letting go of the stitch and reaching for the scissors, 'because I can't do this on my own any more than Harlock could. I need you, Ari. As painful as that is for both of us to hear.'

'Mmph,' I grunted, whether from a sense of satisfaction or from the sharp tug on the wound as he snipped the ends of the threads, even I didn't know. He pressed more gauze against the stitches, to stop them from bleeding.

'You want help with your face?' he asked, his fingers firm against my side.

'Why? What's wrong with it?' I didn't need to ask. I could feel it, the swollen throb and burn of the bootprint that Sick Fuck had left on it. I wished they'd left the bastard alive long enough that I could have returned the favour.

'You haven't looked in a mirror today, have you?' he said.

'Ah, shit.' I stared at the ceiling as he removed the gauze from the stitches and picked a bandage out of the tray.

'Ari.' Yama pulled the backing from the pad and positioned it over the wound. 'What you said before about brothers...'

I shifted my elbow to give him some room. 'What?'

He worked silently, thinking. 'Kei says we're family,' he said at last. 'She says all we've got is each other. And she's right. There's nobody outside of this ship that gives a fuck about any of us.'

'They give a fuck alright,' I said. 'Today's little escapade was proof enough of that.' I watched as he busied himself smoothing the edges of the pad against my skin. 'How'd you find me, anyway?'

'They left your comms on.'

'Dumbshits. They were going to ask for money.'

'For you?' He finished with the bandage and leant over me, assessing the damage to my face.

'Yeah.' Up close I could see into his broken eye, the iris burned black where the hardware had fried.

'Fat chance,' he said, a grin curling the edges of his lips.

I snorted, wincing as he raised the bed so that he could look at me properly.

'Looks like the dark matter has started working already,' he said, dabbing at the split in my lip. And maybe it felt like it too, the burn and sting lessened as Yama poked at my face.

'Mm,' I said around the careful press of the gauze. 'Never worked that fast before.'

He looked abruptly into my eyes and looked away again.

'What?' I asked.

'Nothing.' He shrugged and wiped at my lip, shutting me up with the taste of antiseptic. I grimaced around the bitterness, followed the movement of his fingers with my eyes. It was a strange and intimate moment, the tentative exploration of my face, and the two of us, breathing, in a tiny island of light.

'We need to be a team, Ari. I need to know you've got my back. And you need to know that I've got yours. Like Kei says, we're family, now. And _Arcadia_ is our home.' He wiped at the blood that had dried brittle on my cheek, separated it carefully from my skin.

I exhaled through my nose, my lips tight around an unexpected grief. ' _Arcadia_ doesn't feel like home. Not anymore.'

'Give it time, Ari. It can be home again. And maybe, if you'll give me a chance, we can be brothers. I don't have any family. Not since… '

'Not since Harlock killed your brother,' I said, because he was talking about brothers again and I didn't want to. 'Not that the Admiral was much of a brother, given what he did to you. And what he tried to do to you.' Yeah. I could be a mean SOB when I put my mind to it.

Yama let out a breath, a deep, soul-stripping sigh that made me cringe a little in sympathy.

'It was complicated,' he said. ' _He_ was complicated.' He leaned back on the stool and looked at me. 'He was… well. You know what I mean. You have a brother, don't you?'

'I don't know,' I said, gracing him with an unwavering stare.

He stared back at me, his good eye level and clear, his bad eye watering a little at the edges.

'My brother's gone,' I said, maybe a little harsher than I needed to, because Yama wasn't letting this brother shit go. And because here was another reminder of all the things I'd lost. 'Disappeared out by Mizar years ago. Could be alive. Could be dead. Like I said,' I shifted on the pallet without shifting my gaze, 'I don't know.'

Yama was silent for a moment, probably debating whether to leave well enough alone. One thing I'd learnt about him in the short time he'd been aboard was that he wasn't capable of leaving well enough alone.

He leaned towards me again and wiped at the cut on my nose. 'I'm sorry,' he said, making me sigh a little in exasperation.

'Nothin' to be sorry for. It happened years ago. I'm over it.' _Mostly._

'What was his name?' he asked, still not letting it go.

'Phil,' I said, watching for the inevitable eyebrow raise. Yama didn't disappoint, the gauze stopping mid-air as his eyes moved questioningly to meet mine.

'Short for Philodemos,' I supplied.

A look of amusement passed across his face and he laughed. A proper laugh that made me smile, despite myself.

'Yeah,' I said. 'My mother had a great sense of humour. Shame she had to waste it on the kids.'

* * *

I woke sometime in the night, the air cool and the lights low and the steady _thud… thud… thud…_ of the ship living and breathing around me. And Miimé, standing beside the bed with her face pale as a moon rising in the dim half-light.

'Déjà vu,' I murmured, half-asleep as she crawled into the bed beside me, slid her long legs around my own and rested a hand against my chest. I closed my eyes against the night, breathing deep as she nestled her head in the crook of my neck, her hair electric against my chin and her breath dark with the odour of the Captain's wine.

'Harlock is leaving,' she said, and maybe that was a tear I felt tracking down the warm space between us.

I shifted on the bed, curled my fingers around her hand where it lay cool against my chest.

'Darlin', he's already gone.'


	3. Part 3

**Darwin's First Law**

* * *

 **PART THREE**

* * *

I was alone when I awoke, the place where Miimé had lay as cold and empty as though she'd never been there at all.

I hauled myself upright, swung my legs over the edge of the bed and sat there a while, letting the air settle cool against my skin. _Leaving,_ she'd said, with all the sadness of the universe in her voice. I shivered, but whether from cold or from foreboding, I never really knew.

I slid from the bed and peered at my face in the mirror. Yama had been right – the dark matter was working faster. The cuts were almost healed and the swelling around my eye had subsided to the palest of bruises. I bent into a fresh pair of pants, the pain in my ribs now the faintest of memories, the stitches in my side itching and tight as I shrugged into a dark sweater. I brushed my fingers through my hair and felt almost human again.

* * *

I found Yattaran in the mess, hunched over a bowl of noodles. The sight made me stop in my tracks and roll up a sleeve to check my chronometer – it was still in the a.m., ship's time, but last I heard noodle soup hadn't been on anybody's list of approved breakfast items.

Yattaran grunted a greeting as I slid into the chair opposite, and I grunted a marginally more eloquent reply. I leaned back in the chair, trying to stretch the crick out of my neck that Sick Fuck had kicked into it.

'Eating?' he asked, not caring if I said yes or if I said no. As long as he had food in his mouth he was happy – the state of other people's stomachs was none of his never-mind. I shook my head in the negative, faintly nauseous at the thought of noodle soup for breakfast.

'New guy?' I grunted, indicating the broad-shouldered stranger hard at work behind the servery.

'Few weeks now,' Yattaran replied, touching something brown to his lips to make sure it was safe to put into his mouth. It must have been, because it disappeared down his throat with barely a pause in the proceedings. 'Where you been the past month?'

I wondered that myself. 'What's his name?'

'Roscoe,' he said, barely glancing up from his breakfast. 'He can cook alright, but all he ever cooks is this.' He pushed his fork through the noodles, curdling my stomach as the odour of some kind of meat wafted into my face. It was way too early in my day for meat.

I looked away from the first mate's incessant shovelling and turned to watch Roscoe's bare muscled arms at work. A girl in a grass skirt was tattooed across the hard planes of a bicep, her hips mesmerising me with their swaying as he chopped the shit out of a carrot. I rubbed wearily at my eyes, feeling like I'd been asleep for far too long.

'Did Captain tell you?' Yattaran asked, appraising the scabs on my face critically then nodding satisfied to himself, as though he'd just put two and two together and come up with a lot more than four.

'Which captain,' I replied automatically.

'Joke's getting old,' he said, reaching for the pepper. 'Kid's doing best he can, given the shitheads he's got to work with.'

'Oh. _That_ captain.' I watched as he heaped the pepper into his bowl. 'And don't call me shithead.'

'Hah,' he said. Not quite a laugh, and not quite an indictment. Just a noise he felt like making whilst peppering his noodles. 'Did Captain tell you?'

'Tell me what?'

'You've got a dark matter signature,' he said, stirring the pepper through the bowl. 'That's why you're healing so fast.'

I stared at his face as he poked through the noodles, at the glisten of saliva in the corners of his lips. 'I don't understand,' I said, my stomach clenching itself around the stench of boiled meat.

Yattaran opened his mouth, closed it again as Roy and Diego entered the mess, nodding their hellos as they ambled past, grinning. He waited until they moved to a table on the far side of the room, forked a pile of noodles into his mouth and said around them, 'You've got your own signature, Ari. We all have. Those of us that survived the Battle, that is.'

'Those of us that were resurrected, you mean.' Because _survived_ was hardly the word for it. I'd died defending the bridge when the Coalition boarded for the second time, had taken a hit to the back and felt my spine shatter, the bone crumbling as one of the Coalition's newer, nastier weapons liquefied the connective tissue. I'd never felt pain like it, and maybe the dark matter was already too strong in my blood because I'd had a hell of a time dying from the slow creep of paralysis, the beat of my heart slowing inexorably as my lungs gasped on air that reeked of burning flesh. Oblivion, when it came, was not a calm loosening of the soul, but a harsh and violent spasm as my body unwillingly gave up the ghost.

Yattaran shrugged and resumed his haphazard slurping, tiny drops of soup flying from the noodles to stain the table darkly. 'The signatures aren't as strong as Harlock's of course, but we got a hell of a surprise when you lit up the scanners. You glowed so bright we were able to pinpoint your exact location on that piss-ant little ship.' Another forkful of noodles disappeared carelessly into his mouth.

I leant my elbows on the table and pushed my fingers into my hair. Pressed them hard into my scalp as I stared down at the drops of soup spattered across the table-top. 'How is this possible?'

'Right?' He slurped at the soup that filled the bottom of the bowl. 'I'm guessing that when Harlock released the dark matter it entered our bodies at a molecular level.' He waved his fork in the air, the metal glinting brightly in my peripheral vision. 'We already had it in our blood, just from the years of proximity, and maybe the two processes combined…'

He sat back in his chair, thinking. 'Our blood must have been at saturation. Maybe the molecular penetration was the catalyst. Maybe the saturation levels are why some of us lived, and some of us died. Or maybe – '

'Or maybe,' I said, still staring at the table-top, 'the same thing happened to Harlock, a hundred years ago.'

Yattaran's mouth ceased moving, and I lifted my head to watch as light dawned behind the red-rimmed eyes.

'He knew,' I said to the first mate, feeling suddenly sick to my stomach. 'Harlock knew. He didn't release the dark matter again to save the Earth. He did it to save _us.'_

'Son of a bitch,' Yattaran said.

'Oh, God.' I leaned back in my chair and scrubbed a hand across my face, felt the last of the scabs crust flaking beneath my fingers.

Harlock had saved us that day. He'd brought us back to life and we'd rewarded him with anger.

And maybe even hate.

* * *

An pair of antiquated doors loomed towards me out of the dark, twin slabs of anarchy that reached above my head to at least half again my height. It was here that the gunmetal lines of _Arcadia_ ended, the cool grey of the corridors giving abruptly away to fixtures of rich and polished wood – a world that was carved and heavy and dark, and as out of place in this universe as Harlock was.

I pressed a hand against the door and felt thunder vibrate through my fingertips. I imagined Harlock alone in the vast expanse beyond, preoccupied with his thinking and slowly buckling beneath the weight of all those thoughts. Realised I'd been watching blindly as Harlock's world diminished, and his dream of Arcadia finally, irrevocably, slipped through his fingers.

I leaned my head towards the door to listen, knocked once and heard his voice carry faint over the thunder.

'Aristotle,' he said, knowing who it was because he always knew. Another of the mysteries I would never have the chance to unravel. I swung the door wide on its hinges and inhaled the mellow odour of ageing wood. There was a bitterness there. The acrid smell of defeat.

'So,' I said into the vastness of the room. 'This is what you do all day. Stare out at… that.'

He seemed small where he stood at the window, diminished by the soaring panes of leaded glass and the dark matter boiling against the windows at his back. Thunder sounded through the structure of the sterncastle, caught as it was in the trailing edge of the IN-skip maelstrom.

'Sometimes,' he said, with something that might have been both hope and trepidation chasing across the contours of his face. He was wearing one of his older flightsuits, black with yellow piping and a Jolly Roger scraped and flaking on the chest. It made him look younger somehow, and vulnerable, with the vaults of the ceiling soaring high above him like a church. I wondered why, in all our years of drinking, I'd never thought once about the arches of the windows or the polished mirror of the floor, or the smooth wide desk with its undiminishing burden of wine.

He paced the short distance to his desk, his steps weighed down with something far more burdensome than gravity.

'How are you, Aristotle?'

I crossed to the opposite side of the desk and stood there, with one hand resting against the smoothness of the wood and a fingertip tracing itself absently across the beautifully polished gulf that had somehow, sometime, opened up between us.

'I'm alright,' I said, _for a man who'd been stabbed and almost raped by the sickest fuck on the dark side of Orion._

I didn't say that last part out loud, but maybe Harlock saw some of it in my eyes, because he reached for an open bottle and poured wine the colour of old blood into a pair of deep, round glasses, and proffered one in my direction. Thunder sounded, almost drowning out his words.

'Drink,' he said, in the old way, a memory of the countless days we'd lost to the dark stinking bars of the outworlds.

I took the drink from his hand, his ungloved fingers pale where they curled around the glass. 'Thanks,' I said, wincing at the unfiltered sting of dark matter when my fingers encountered his own.

He took a seat in the chair behind the desk, a carved and heavy wooden thing, as tormented by the passage of time as Harlock was himself. 'I never got used to that,' he said.

'Funny,' I said, setting myself down in the only place available, on the two-seater that was angled towards the desk. Miimé's terrain, and I could smell the scent of her hair buried deep in the upholstery. 'All this time I never thought you noticed.'

His lips tightened behind the shadow of his glass. 'I had a hundred years to pretend it wasn't happening.'

'And now I'll have a hundred years to pretend it isn't happening.' I poured half the wine down my throat, felt it slide warm across my tongue. 'We all will.'

His good eye met mine and then looked sharply away. He said nothing. Stared silently into his wine.

I turned away from his downturned face and raked my gaze across the floor, the high arches of the windows, the bed across the room with its covers pulled so tight you could probably bounce Yattaran off them. 'Sleeping?'

'Not so much.'

I returned my gaze to the contents of the desk, eyes lighting on an object resting at its far edge. It emerged half-carved of bone, unidentified and pale. A knife lay beside it, and a pile of powdery shavings.

'It's something I learned to make when I was young,' Harlock said, without me even asking. 'I'm surprised I remembered how to do it. Seems like a million years ago, now.'

I sucked down another mouthful of wine. 'Been doing that a lot?'

'Carving ocarinas?' he asked, his mouth quirking in bemusement.

'Remembering.'

'Trying not to.' A rueful smile chased across his face as he raised his glass into the light. 'That's what this is for.'

I watched the light glint darkly through the wine. 'And how's that working?' I asked.

'It's never worked.'

I sighed and rubbed my free hand tiredly at my face. 'You're making this way too easy for me.'

'What?'

'Conversation.'

He laughed. 'I'll miss you, Aristotle.'

'So it's true, then,' I said. 'You're leaving.'

'I have to.' He returned the glass to the desk, his hair falling across his face. 'How can I face them, after everything I did?'

'And yet Yama faces them every day, after everything he did.' The words came out hard, harsher than I meant them to, and he flinched as they crashed against him.

I watched him silently, an apology itching on my tongue but my mouth unwilling to open enough to let it out.

'You're right,' he said at last. 'Yama is the better man.'

I sighed, my teeth unclamping from their stubborn grip around my tongue. 'That isn't what I meant.' Or maybe it was. Who the fuck would know. I sighed again, a huge, heartfelt sigh I'd been holding onto for weeks. 'Yama's a kid. He doesn't have a fuckin' clue.'

'He's a man,' Harlock said. 'A product of the same military machine as I was.'

'But he _isn't_ you,' I said childishly, resisting the urge to blurt out something sentimental, something less than manly. Something clichéd and girly like 'don't go,' or 'we can't do this without you.' Or something desperate, like 'take me with you.'

Instead, I said, _'Arcadia_ needs her captain.'

' _Arcadia_ has a captain.'

I glared at him, at his obtuseness, at his determination to send this conversation around in useless circles. 'But he's not you.'

'You're wrong. Yama _is_ me.'

He looked at me, and I sensed that maybe it was me that was being obtuse. That I wasn't getting what he was trying to say.

'I've lived too long, Aristotle. The cycle is already repeating itself.'

I cradled the goblet in my hand, felt the glass warming beneath my fingers as I waited for him to continue, his voice as disembodied as the ghost he was about to become.

'Yama is me,' he said again. 'A different time, a different man, but still me. Don't give up on him, Aristotle. Don't let him make the same mistakes that I did.'

He turned to look out of the high-arched windows, stared into the roiling cloud of dark matter that battered against the cut-glass panes. I followed his gaze, stared into a darkness that boiled with red lightnings. I realised in that moment that the dark matter was both the cause and the effect, the giver of life, and the prolonger of untold agonies. Harlock had suffered those agonies more than any of us, and here was me in the way, stopping him from breaking free.

'You released the dark matter again,' I said, studying his features in the half-light, memorising them, before he slipped away. 'Knowing what had happened before. And what would happen again.'

The hint of a smile ghosted across his face, and suddenly it hurt me to talk. Because maybe, in those final moments, we'd meant more to him than even his dream of Earth.

My fingers tightened around the glass and I fought the urge to break it. To feel the glass slice warm into my skin. Anything to break the hold of life and death and eternity. 'How sure were you that it would work?'

'Not very.' He smiled, lifting his face so that I saw him, fully, for the very first time. 'But I hoped.'

 _...end..._

* * *

Thanks go to Helen1969 for her unfailing encouragement, and for being a great sounding board, and for letting me steal Hechi from _Red Shift Blues_ …


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